Category — dharma

I’m teaching a workshop based on my upcoming book, The Wisdom of a Broken Heart. It will take place May  15-17 at beautiful Karme Choling Shambhala Meditation Center in Barnet, VT.

In the Shambhala tradition, a broken heart, rather than a problem to be solved, is considered a remarkable opportunity to discover your innate spiritual warriorship. Only by plunging into the depths of your heart can you achieve the self-knowledge and genuine presence that are associated with wisdom and personal power. And when your heart is broken, you really have no choice. Your insides have been turned upside down and your deepest fears and concerns are no longer manageable. You can’t run and you can’t hide and so it is time to meet them.

This weekend program will gently introduce you to the skills needed to work with a broken heart – not to drive it away or tie it up with a bow, but to find the message of wisdom contained in this most difficult situation.

You will learn meditation, the practice of loving kindness, and several on-the-spot techniques to use throughout the day. In addition, we will:

• Discuss the wisdom aspect of painful emotions
• Contemplate one’s history with such emotions
• Shift the emphasis from finding love to offering it as a way to reclaim power
• Learn to stabilize your heart in a state of openness

Whether your heart was broken yesterday or years ago, the elements needed to tread this path are present. As we progress, you will discover that gentleness, fearlessness, and intelligence are marks of spiritual warriorship and that the dark power of heartbreak can introduce you to them. If you stay with your broken heart, it will surely lead you down the path to wisdom.

It’s not expensive–$275, not including housing. Click here for more info.

Here is an excerpt from the book and a bit more detail about the weekend:

The third kind of friendliness is called Sympathetic Joy. This is when you are made happy by the happiness of others. It’s surprising how difficult this can be–it’s actually easier to feel sorry for people when they’re down than pleasure when they’re up. Guess it conjures up all sorts of jealousy, old grudges, personal comparisons, etc.

Sure, it’s no problem when people you love/approve of/agree with win the lottery or fall in love. But what about strangers? People you don’t like? It’s actually possible to find within yourself the capacity to enjoy their happiness. I’m not talking about some kind of moralistic, politically or emotionally correct (ok, I just coined the phrase “emotionally correct”) situation. I’m talking about a genuine sense of warmth and delight whenever happiness of any sort enters this world, no matter who is acting as its channel. This world needs happiness. It needs love. Ease. Satisfaction. Contentment. The genuine kinds, not the kinds that come from “winning.” (Winning doesn’t bring happiness. It brings hunger for more winning.) When the positive side of the balance is weighted, we should rejoice. This is a kind of advanced friendliness. Imagine what the world would be like if we all worked this angle.

It’s interesting to note that the suffering of others is not the only thing that can cause your heart to open spontaneously. It can also  occur when we observe someone else’s authentic happiness. Human nature is hard-wired this way. Anybody who has ever cried during a soft drink commercial or at a wedding has experienced sympathetic joy. When my husband proposed to me over dinner in a restaurant, the lady at the next table burst into tears. Something inside us is deeply touched by meaningful moments whether they are in our life or another’s. There is a spontaneous upwelling of joy for others.

When others are happy, we have the capacity to feel that happiness as if it were our own. We’re not just happy for them, we feel happy ourselves and essentially there is no difference.

A good way to experiment with this is to practice looking for simple signs of other people’s pleasure. We don’t have to start with trying to feel happy for Osama bin Laden or whatever. If you see someone on the subway happily engrossed in a book, allow yourself to feel the delight of that kind of engagement. You don’t have to approve of the book or anything; don’t even pay attention to stuff like that–just check in with the felt sense, not the object that caused it. If some people in the news were rescued from a plane crash, take a moment to imagine the relief of their families and friends. Breathe a sigh of relief with them. If someone in your office receives flowers, imagine their scent and vividness. You can feel uplifted by a gift that was given to someone else. You don’t have to wait until someone gives you flowers to find their joy. Joy can always be found.

Buddhists say that there are 108 opportunities in every moment to wake up, to find true bliss. Probably like 324 just went by in the time it took me to write that sentence. We can train ourselves to look for these moments in all things. Fear is when we train ourselves to look in the opposite direction: for opportunities to freak out.

Usually, we imagine that we’ll be able to enjoy other people’s pleasures once we have created a safe and secure situation for ourselves–until then we have to look out for #1. But it can actually work the other way around. Attuning to the joy of others (rather than the ways they could potentially threaten us) creates the conditions for genuine, lasting fearlessness, the kind that is not dependent on your latest victory.

Click here for Part One (Lovingkindness) and here for Part Two (Compassion). Stay tuned for Part Four (Equanimity).

Two interviews with different FOX shows today (online shows that are also made available to local affiliates). Topic is meditation. Have no idea how it’s going to go. It’s hard to talk about meditation without sounding goofy. Wish me luck.

I just learned that a friend friends of a friend are getting married. Congratulations, Ethan Kirsten and Kyle! This inspired me to look for an article I wrote for the Shambhala Sun. It’s about what we’re really committing to when we get into a relationship.

I Do?

This past summer, I went to a meditation retreat center to practice for several weeks together with my community. At dinner on the first evening, I struck up a conversation with the guy sitting next to me. He looked to be in his early 60s and I found out that he was a longtime student of Buddhism. We told each other a bit about ourselves, including what we did for work, if either was married, had a family, etc. He was wondering about moving in with his new girlfriend—much younger than he, more enthusiastic about living together than he, hoping, he feared, for what we all eventually discover is impossible—to stabilize a relationship. He was also concerned about giving up his solitude and really didn’t know how long he would want the relationship to continue. Given all this, should they live together, could this work, he asked? I was totally ready with “I have no idea” when a voice popped into my head and said, “Of course it can work. As long as you don’t expect it to make you happy.” So I reported these words and we had a moment.  We were kind of embarrassed—yes, Buddhists are supposed to know that craving creates suffering, but I guess we still secretly hoped that a relationship would make us happy, if only we could get the circumstances just right.

My new pal and I talked about this, how relationships can blind us to the dharma quicker than anything. As we said goodbye and I watched him walk away, I wanted to call out “don’t be afraid to tell yourself the truth about relationships.” And then I wondered, well what is the truth, exactly? Do I really believe they’re not supposed to make you happy? And when we long for a lasting relationship (as most people I know do), why do we forget that craving creates suffering?

When my husband and I began talking about getting married, we covered lots of topics: who would marry us, who to invite, what to wear, whether or not we would be able to convince our favorite Cajun band to learn “Hava Nagila.” (We were. Shout out to Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys.)

Then the most important question came up: what would we say to each other to mark this commitment? What were our intentions and which words expressed them best?

We spent time reading various liturgies, Buddhist and otherwise, and talking about what we liked and disliked at other people’s weddings. As we read the words thousands and millions of other couples had spoken to each other, I became increasingly uncomfortable. Most of them ended with “I do.” I do…what? Marriage is a commitment to share love, have sex, and try to stay together with this one person, right?

Well maybe, but I couldn’t promise to do these things. I knew I couldn’t say, “I do” to love—feelings change and keep changing, and so on. I also knew I couldn’t say yes to wanting to have sex with him for the rest of my life—desire is unpredictable. And ask him to commit to me? Which me? I couldn’t commit to remaining the same me—I wouldn’t. So if you can’t say yes to love, sex, or remaining the one each fell in love with—what are you agreeing to when you commit to a relationship?

It’s just now, eight years later, that I’m finding out what—apparently—I said yes to.

I said yes to the unfolding, impenetrable arc of uncertainty. I guess I thought that finding love was an end point, that some kind of search was over and I would find home.  We would leap over the threshold together into whatever we imagined our ideal cottage to be. But really we stepped through a crazy looking-glass. No matter how hard we tried, how madly in love we were, or how skillfully we planned our life together, there was complete uncertainty about what the connection would feel like from day to day. I could give all the love I had (with great joy) and get back a blank stare. I could wake up as my crankiest, most sullen and narcissistic self, roll over, and greet the face of unconditional acceptance. Or not. It’s like the weather: you can try to read the signs and guess about atmospheric conditions, but really there’s no telling. As far as I can see, this never changes; the relationship never stabilizes, ever. In which case you can’t actually promise each other anything. This is how it works. I have no idea why. But like when I’m listening to a meteorologist explain why it’s going to rain, I think, “Who cares? I’m just trying to figure out what outfit to wear today.”

It seems that I committed to a lifetime of delight and sadness, inseparable from each other. Every time I look into my dear one’s eyes and feel how deeply we’re connected, the moment disappears before I can actually hold it—and I have to watch it do so. It’s excruciating. It’s much easier to do this with your thoughts on a meditation cushion than with the feeling you get from his breath on your shoulder as you fall asleep. But now I get that I have to repeat this until the end of my life and that somehow this is love’s road.

I wish I had known that when you live with someone for a long time, there is continuous, mind-blowing irritation. (Okay I did know this, but I forgot.) Often the irritation arises when you try to replace your actual partner with a projection of a partner instead. They always figure out a way to tell you how unlike your projection they really are, which, once you pick yourself up, gives you yet another opportunity to choose between who this person is and who you sort of hoped he was. No matter how many times I prompt my husband with the correct lines for his role, he does not get into character. This irritates me. We have to throw away the script and just begin to improvise. You’re playing you and I’m playing me. Go.

I didn’t really understand that love does not arise, abide, or dissolve in connection with any particular feeling. It has almost nothing to do with feeling. (Nor does it seem to be a gesture, a commitment to stay, becoming best friends, or anything else I might have thought.) Love has become a container in which we live. Through time and riding mysterious waves of passion, aggression, and ignorance (and boredom), I think we began to live within love itself. At least I did. Each time I opened up, extended myself, accepted what was being offered to me, stepped beyond my comfort zone to embrace him, the structure was reinforced. I no longer have any idea if I love my husband or not. I can’t imagine what the feelings I have for him could be called. I’ve even given up trying to love him. Our relationship is what gives us love, not the other way around. This is how it is.

And of course you’re saying “I do” to goodbye. This bond will end. Hello can only mean goodbye, one way or another. Some relationships are just mistakes. Or people grow and change. Relationships can crater and nobody knows why. And if all else fails, certainly at death we will part. Saul Bellow once called this acknowledgment “the black backing on the mirror that allows us to see anything at all” and isn’t that just the key to the whole thing. The deeper our connection becomes, the more I know the reality of its ending, the more passionately I’m able to feel his touch. I know this even when I hate him (and he can really be an asshole—I’m not kidding) and when I love him so much that I plead for the opportunity to be married for all our lifetimes.

Each time my love expands by a molecule, it grows a same-sized molecule of sorrow. The more I love, the edgier it all feels, and the more courage is required. Where one gets this courage, I really don’t know. Surprisingly, it just seems to be there. And if you’re looking for a crucible in which to heat compassion, this is a really good one. Someone once told me that compassion is the ability to hold love and pain together in the same moment. So at least we’re learning something, which is what I tell myself. It sort of helps, but not really.

Maybe everything I’ve said is wrong; that’s totally possible. It’s just what I’ve learned. And here’s something else I’ve learned about a relationship: Okay, so it’s not what you think it’s going to be, the feelings are always changing, and you’re going to have to say goodbye someday.  But when you find your true love, there is something inside that simply and inexplicably says hello to him. Yes to him. Of course to him. Certainly. Obviously, it’s you. There is no choice. I do.

At its core, fear is a profound shutting down, a closing of the heart. When we experience fear, we want it to go away as quickly as possible because it’s just so damn uncomfortable. I’m not saying there isn’t a lot to be afraid of. I mean we can all freak out about money without too much thought these days. But even if you’re sitting on a pile of cash, everyone is till afraid of things like getting their heart broken or failing to achieve certain goals. However, the quickest antidote to fear is also the most counter-intuitive: to turn towards it.

In Buddhist thought, there are four ways to do this. They are called The Four Immeasurables:

Lovingkindness
Compassion
Sympathetic Joy (my personal favorite)
Equanimity

These could be considered antidotes to fear because instead of making you feel powerless, besieged, and threatened, employing any of these four actions lead to a sense of power, stability, and a sense of being unconquerable. We’ll look at each one in turn.

Loving-kindness
Loving-kindness is viewed as a practice, not an emotion. Through this practice, you can feel kindness toward anyone, under any circumstance, without acting like a saint or giving in all the time. Loving-kindness doesn’t mean acting nice even when you really, really don’t feel like it. It means holding your attention in the present moment without turning away. Then you can act appropriately. Sometimes the most loving thing is to offer the hand of friendship. Sometimes it’s to run away. Sometimes it’s to put your foot down–you just don’t know unless you’re paying attention. The first step in paying attention is to soften your opinions and judgments so you can actually see what’s going on. Instead of fighting whatever frightens you, you try to make friends with it. This is always a better choice.

This practice explains how to do this.

During the practice, you offer unconditional friendship, to yourself, to a loved one, to a friend, to a stranger, to an enemy, and finally to all beings. You call each one to mind and then wish these things for him or her:

May you be happy.
May you be healthy.
May you be peaceful.
May you live with ease.

It is very important to begin the practice by offering loving-kindness to yourself. You do this by picturing yourself in your mind’s eye. Think about how hard you work for happiness. Allow yourself to feel the strength of your own efforts. Sometimes people are tempted to skip this step because it can seem awkward at first to wish yourself well in this simple way. It can feel a little sacrilegious as if you’re being a narcissist or something. But it’s beneficial to practice simple acceptance of yourself and your wish to be happy. You can then begin to feel compassion for yourself. The Buddha said, “You can search throughout the entire universe for someone who is more deserving of your love and affection than you are yourself, and that person is not to be found anywhere. You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.”

From this basis of loving-kindness toward self, move on to a loved one. You can choose your spouse, a child, or a pet. You don’t have to work to generate love for this being, you simply think of him or her and love is there. If no one makes you feel this way, you can imagine an admirable character from a book or movie. When you think of this being, acknowledge how hard he or she tries to be happy, and that you wish them this happiness completely.

The person you choose as friend can be anyone who has shown kindness to you. It could be your best girlfriend, a teacher you had in 4th grade, or a doctor who took care of you. This person too wants to be happy, and you can wish this for him or her.

A stranger is someone about whom you have no feelings, positive or negative, such as the supermarket cashier or a person you sat next to on the bus. You may not know this person at all, but you can be certain he or she too is trying to find happiness. Although you may not have a sense for this person’s efforts toward achieving happiness, you have the ability to wish him or her well simply because they, like you and your loved one, have joys and sorrows, and are struggling in their own way.

Then choose an enemy, someone who has hurt or angered you. It doesn’t have to be the worst person you’ve ever known, although it could be. Pick someone with whom you’ve argued or who has disappointed or caused trouble for you. If there is no one like this in your life, you can choose a historical or fictional person who you find hateful. Bring this person’s face to mind, just as you did with the others, understanding that he or she just wants to be happy, too. See if you can connect with this understanding and from this place wish for his or her happiness, health, peace, and love. It’s no problem to do this for a loved one, but by the time you work yourself down to whomever you’ve visualized as an enemy (his ex-wife, a backstabbing colleague, a politician; someone you really detest), it can become challenging to offer happiness. But it can be extremely healing to offer happiness to someone you ordinarily wish ill—even just learning that doing so is possible is very inspiring.

Finally, offer your good wishes and tenderheartedness to all beings. Everyone, every single person, is trying to be happy, to find warmth, to get enough to eat, to create a home, and to protect those who are dependent on him or her. Animals, insects, and birds also exhibit these behaviors; all beings do. You can take them into your heart and wish them well.

If you try this practice when you are feeling your most fearful, I guarantee it will leave you feeling way, way calmed down. Love is definitely the answer to fear.

Here are condensed practice instructions:

Click here for guided audio instruction.

Click here for Part Two of this series, on Compassion.

I’ve been a meditation instructor for about two years now. During that time, I’ve noticed some cruel hoaxes being perpetrated on would-be meditators, making meditation seem much more complicated than it really is. Although it’s not easy, it is actually a simple technique. (Click here for instruction.) It’s so simple that it’s easy to miss its profundity.

Here are the 5 most common misconceptions I hear:

1.    Meditation means you have to stop thinking.
This is simply not possible. Your mind cannot stop producing thoughts; that is what it does. Attempting to stop thinking would be like opening your eyes and telling them not to see.  Quite frustrating, not to mention unachievable.

Instead, meditation is about making a different relationship to your thoughts. Rather than becoming embroiled in them, allowing the bad ones to make you feel bad and the good ones to make you feel good, you step back, notice them as they flow by, and feel the accompanying feelings (or lack thereof) fully. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a trickle or torrential. Just as you can observe a gentle drizzle or a wild hurricane from a distance, so you can also observe your thoughts and emotions.

2.    The object of meditation is to create peace of mind and I can’t meditate because I just can’t calm my mind down.
Not so. Sometimes when you sit, your mind becomes peaceful and that’s great. Other times however, you just sit there the whole time working with a speedy jumble of thoughts that never stop coming. Either one is okay. The only thing that makes meditation hard is when you try to fight what your mind is doing. If you allow it, if you allow the peace, allow the turmoil, allow the boredom, your mind is much more likely to settle down than if you try to tell it how to act. And even if it doesn’t, the simple effort to work with your mind rather than allow it to run away with you creates positive effects.

One of the great things about meditation is you don’t have to pretend to be a blissed out calm person. You can be as frantic, silly, brilliant, equanimous and/or confused as you actually are.

3.    If I’m not having special experiences (profound emotional catharses, energy up the spine, glimpses into the nature of reality, levitation to another planet), there’s something wrong with the meditation practice and/or I’m just not doing it right.
There is nothing more ordinary than the practice of sitting meditation. I mean, you’re sitting there. You’re breathing. You’re observing your mind as it is, as it would be even if you weren’t meditating. Rather than seeking to cultivate experiences (or just hoping some would happen to counteract the boredom), the practice is to hang out with yourself just as you are. Unconditionally. It is such a relief to take a break from the search for entertainment and distraction. Actually, when you start to get bored, that’s probably the best indicator that the practice is really starting to become beneficial.

4.    I find meditation too hard, so instead I do walking/running/listening to music/yoga as my meditation practice.
Although many activities can have a pacifying affect on your nervous system such as taking a walk or listening to Bach’s Unaccompanied Cello Suites, these are not meditation. They are meditative. Any endeavor that unifies body and mind such as swimming, doing yoga, knitting—anything you do that, if you take your mind off of it, you mess it up—is profoundly soothing. We love these things. However, as mentioned, the idea behind meditation isn’t to calm down. It’s to wake up. Turn around. Look yourself right in the eye and discover who you really are.

5.    I’ve learned various kinds of meditation and I like parts of them all so I’ve combined those parts into my own unique practice.
Although I completely understand why someone would do this, it’s really not a good idea. Buddhist meditation practices are more than 2500 years old. They’ve been tested and honed over time. Millions and millions of people have used them well, screwed them up, attained realization, and confused the hell out of themselves. We can learn from them and trust that the instructions have been honed by their experiences over centuries and we don’t need to reinvent the wheel.

The traditional practices are unimpeachable in their elegance, precision, and profundity. We usually try to skip out once the practice becomes difficult and think, well this particular practice isn’t for me, I’d better try another one. And you should try different practices to see which one suits you. But at some point you’ve got to stop trying them out and pick one. Stick with it. Stay. Let it unfold. Let it guide you instead of the other way around.

If you follow one piece of advice from this whole post, this would be the most important one.

Courtesy of the talented Rod Meade Sperry at The Worst Horse.

Someone e-mailed me this question yesterday.

Q: Susan, I have trouble committing myself to the cushion… please address this.

A: We all have difficulty with this. I totally understand. When you sit on the cushion, you’re agreeing to sit down with the unknown. Sometimes this feels terrifying, sometimes exciting but, mostly, it’s just kind of ordinary–and it’s this ordinariness that might make us think “nothing is happening” or “I must be doing this wrong.” And then we give up. However, it’s actually considered a good sign when the practice becomes a bit boring–you’ve stopped trying to entertain yourself. So hang in there with all the ups and downs–and flatness.

Buddhists have written a lot on overcoming the obstacles to a meditation practice, because people have been encountering these obstacles for like 2500 years. (I write about them in detail in my book.) The traditional obstacles are:

Laziness (of which there are 3 kinds: regular; becoming disheartened; being too busy)

Forgetting the Instructions (spacing them out, basically)

Laxity/Elation (being too sleepy and dull or getting carried away by some exciting experience while meditating—both are distractions).

Some of the suggestions for overcoming these obstacles include:

1. Trust. At some point, you had an insight that meditation was valuable. That’s what made you decide to try it out. You can trust that insight. Recall it to yourself before you practice.

2. Take it slow. Don’t commit to a life-long meditation practice and then beat yourself up when you screw up on day 3. Don’t do that. The only thing worse than not practicing is beating yourself up for not practicing. So instead of diving in head first, commit to a week-long meditation practice. Say to yourself, “I’m just going to sit for 10 minutes a day for one week.” (Or 20, or 30, or 5, or whatever you choose.) “At the end of that time, I’m going to reconsider.” Then you can do anything you want. You can commit to another week. Or month. Don’t decide about the next phase until you complete the current one. And so on. Just make the commitment doable.

3. Delineate. Before you sit down to practice, tell yourself: “Now I’m going to meditate. Period. Everything else can wait, nothing is going to be more important to me for the next ten minutes. Not e-mail, not the phone, not my responsibilities, nothing. Period.” (Or five, or twenty, or whatever you decide).

4. Create critical mass. If you practice for a few minutes every day, this is way better than a lot of minutes on a few days. Routine is the key. Continuity is more important than duration. Then at some point your practice reaches the kind of critical mass that brushing your teeth has. It’s just something you do and it feels icky if you don’t do it.

5. Review. Before you sit, review the instructions. It’s so easy to forget them. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve sat down to meditate and it took me 10 minutes to remember, oh yeah, I’m supposed to be focused on my breath. If you’re doing Shamatha (The Practice of Tranquility) as I recommend in my book, read over the points of posture, instructions on breath, etc. before you practice. Whatever your practice, review the key points. Just a quick review really helps.

6. Keep coming back. If you have a fabulous experience or an awful one on the cushion, it’s all the same. Don’t let either convince you that you’re doing it right or wrong. Just keep coming back. As long as you’re coming back—to your breath, to  your cushion—you’re doing it right.

7. Find community. It is crazy helpful to practice with others. You can go to a Shambhala Center (which is the lineage I practice in) if your town has one, or a Zen center, or a Vipassana center. These are all good. Just make sure that you choose a lineage that is, say, older than two thousand years. We want something trustworthy and time-tested! Most meditation centers have public sitting where you can get some instruction or just sit with others. It’s enormously supportive and inspiring to be with others who are working with their minds as you endeavor to. And of course, you’re always, always welcome to join me on one of my retreats. My website has the schedule.

I offer audio meditation instruction here. E-mail me with any questions. Seriously.

Other practitioners: What are your suggestions? What helps you to overcome obstacles?

Last, remember that If you take your seat, rouse the intention and aspiration to meditate, the practice will do the rest. All you have to do is walk through the gate.

Spoke recently with Stephen Mitchell, internationally respected translator of the world’s great wisdom texts, who has published versions of the Tao Te Ching, the Bhagavad Gita, The Book of Job, and Gilgamesh. His wife is Byron Katie, author of Loving What Is, among other wonderful books about wakefulness and joy.

I talked with Stephen for my upcoming book, The Wisdom of a Broken Heart, which will be out in Jan 2010. I wanted to talk to him about stuff like The Secret and the idea that thinking positively could effect outcomes. When your heart is broken, you want to rearrange your thoughts so that they’re not so ridiculously painful. You want to have faith in something, to believe that what you’re experiencing is leading you to something “better.” And I really believe that it is–but I also believe we can’t know what that something is, so imagining so-called positive outcomes as a way of escaping current pain could actually be more confusing. Not to mention dulling and silly. I mean who wants to ignore reality and instead insist everything’s fine, everything’s fine, everything’s fine, if I only think the right thoughts, I can have everything I want. Yet gaining dominion over your thoughts is critical to working with heartbreak to end up wiser than when you went in.

So I couldn’t help but wonder (if I may pull a spiritual Carrie Bradshaw; cue words scrolling across computer screen):

What is the difference between positive thinking and wishful thinking?

Here is an excerpt from the chapter in my new book called “Have Faith.”

In this sense, faith is not so much a belief that everything is somehow going to work out for the best, which can be very, very difficult to imagine when your heart is broken, when you are literally—and understandably—desperate to believe that what you’re feeling is some kind of divine redirection away from what was bad for you and toward what is going to be way better than you ever imagined. This isn’t really a good state of mind to walk around in. First, it presumes that you know what’s best for you and, honestly, I’ve never found evidence that this is a big enough point of view.

I know that there is a lot of emphasis on thinking positively and believing that you can make good things happen by expecting good things to happen. Recently, I had occasion to speak to my friend Stephen Mitchell about this. He is an internationally respected translator of the world’s great wisdom texts, has published versions of the Tao Te Ching, the Bhagavad Gita, The Book of Job, and Gilgamesh. I asked him if, in his lifelong study of the core teachings of all religions, he’d ever come across this idea. I wrote down what he said, because it was so excellent. Here it is:

The teaching of every one of the great sacred texts is that control is an illusion. When you understand that ultimately you are not the doer, you can step back from yourself. That is the only path to serenity.  In other words, letting go of the illusion of control, and realizing that you never had it in the first place, allows you to live in the most dazzlingly intelligent, beautiful, and kind reality that you could ever have imagined—and beyond what you could have imagined.

I don’t know about you, but I’ll have what he’s having. When I thought about it, I realized that all the many things I had longed for throughout my life and had been lucky enough to get—like a good relationship, great friends, and a cool job—hadn’t exactly made me into Mahatma Gandhi. In a lot of ways, I was just as riled up and dissatisfied as ever. So maybe I wasn’t the supreme arbiter of all things good for me. Now what?

According to Stephen, actually, all I had to do was relax, to allow the world to dazzle me instead of the other way around. So I’m trying. When I can relax enough, I see that, just like me, everyone—regular people, great superstars and profound sages—probably all started out worrying that the world was going to eat them alive or that they simply weren’t lovable enough. We are all just looking for some kind of happiness. Sometimes things work out for us and sometimes they don’t. It really doesn’t matter. Eventually, all our hopes and fears are going to dissolve and at the end of our lives, according to all the deathbed reports we’ve ever received, the only thing that will matter is how loving and brave we’ve been. I mean, come on, all those dying people can’t be wrong. They seem to be saying that all the things you want and all the things you dread are just like waves in the ocean. Eventually, they just become reabsorbed into the vast play of the ocean. And you know what? The ocean doesn’t care. It never gives up. It can accommodate it all, gentle waves that lap the shore and those that roil up ferociously, tiny tidal pools and great, freezing depths. The real secret, the great ones say, is that we are much more like the ocean than the waves. Underneath all our hopes and fears is profound stillness and the memory of how to return to it. You can bank on it.

I asked my twitter pals: what book helped you the most spiritually, whether or not it was considered “spiritual.” Here is what they said:

@MeKathy   The Power of Now

@VincentHorn  : By far it was “Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha

@WilliamHarryman  Pema Chodron’s “Start Where You Are” & Chogyam Trungpa’s “Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior” – these books changed my life

@jamesoreilly  Recently, the self-improvement classic, Power Through Constructive Thinking by Emmet Fox. Still a gem.

@conflux  Jed McKenna’s Enlightenment Trilogy has been the most useful to me so far

@TheEggman__  There are many books that mean so much… the book that started me on the path was The Miracle of Mindfulness, by Thich Nhat Hanh

@librarianlounge  Pema Chodron’s “When Things Fall Apart” and “The Places that Scare You.”

@patrickrhone  The Wooden Bowl, Care of The Soul and Buddhism, Plain and Simple are at the top of my list. It would be hard to pick a top for me.

@finikiotis  Great question. Thanks for asking! Peter Mathiessen’s The Snow Leopard comes to mind. Picked it up recently & it’s still inspiring.

@RevDannyFisher  “Step by Step” by Maha Ghosananda

@dporter Years ago – Surfing the Himalayas – More recent – Celestine Prophecy – Recently – Peaceful Warrior

@dirkjohnson   too late for your list? Tibetan Book of the Dead (shi-tro!), first in Thurman’s but subsequently all translations but Evans-Wentz

@royblumenthal  ZEN & THE ART OF FALLING IN LOVE (Charlotte Kasl). URBAN SHAMAN (Serge Kahili King). THE FOUR AGREEMENTS (Dom Miguel Ruiz).

@pixiesing  Hope it’s not too late to add “Peace is Every Step” (Thich Nhat Hahn) to your list.

@slish  weighing in on great ? –Richard Bach’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull which never fails to inspire when i re-read. simple & true

@Sprinter14   Writings  of Nichiren Daishonin

@MWendyHaylett  The Way of the Bodhisattva by Shantideva, Shin Buddhism: Bits of Rubble Turn into Gold by Taitetsu Unno, Diamond-Cutter Sutra, The Heart Sutra, and Everday Suchness by Gyomay Kubose… sorry for the list and not just 1.

@GenKreton  Not a book but a poem http://bit.ly/n8nj _Please Call Me by My True Names_ by Thich Nhat Hanh.  Extremely moving; holds many truths

@smartstartcoach  Be Here Now by Ram Dass was a fave in 1971; later (circa 1999) I read Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle

@lynnjake : The Alchemist by Paolo Coelho.

@McCashew  The year of Wishful Thinking, Joan Didion

@leonadawson  M Rosenberg: NVC A Language of Life, E Gendlin, Focusing. Books for connecting with one’s own inner world & then living it

@leannahamill  S. Boorstein’s It’s Easier Than You Think, and Jane Eyre.

@susan_marie Susan–has anyone mentioned the wisdom books in the Bible/Hebrew scriptures in response? I especially turn to Sirach/Ecclesiasticus.

@TheEggman__  currently it is ‘For A Future to be Possible’ Thich Nhat Hanh, a good guide for me

@Lotuspad  The Holographic Universe by Michael Talbot. Blew my mind – artfully melds spirituality and science. Second runner up is The Artist’s Way.

@aritadesign  The 4 Agreements and  Power of now, have jump started my spiritual adventure

@jenlouden  this month, YOURS (How Not to Be Afraid of Your Own Life)

@LuminousHeart  Sogyal Rinpoche’s Tibetan Book of the Dead was life changing Maybe 1st I read, first I found in mainstream bookstore. (Brattle St) Also, Magic Dance by Thinley Norbu is a favorite. Currently diving in Dakini’s Warm Breath. Have been longing for this feminine aspect.

@Bodhipaksa  The Dhammapada was what made me realize I was a Buddhist. All it took was the first two verses.

ra3 “Mindfulness in Plain English”, Henepola Gunaratana, sparked my interest